In Week 3, Ionia recruited Jax, and Demacia recruited Kayle.
(Nyroth—13 December, 26 CLE)
The Nyrothian militia brought their shields together in a defensive wall. The forest lay under a quieting blanket of snow. In that soft white silence, anxious boots crunched and armor fastenings creaked. And then, slowly, they began to hear the distant groans of the undead.
“Well whaddya know?” Jax’s garrulous voice boomed. He strode out from the forest, gripping his lamppost in one hand.
He paused, as though noticing the troops for the first time. “Morning, fellas,” he said with a nod, before turning to look out at the faint shapes of the approaching undead army.
He carried on with his personal conversation. “Here I am, back in Nyroth, freezing cold, fighting undead, getting paid.” He struck the base of his lamppost into the snow, and it flourished orange flame. “Good times.”
(Piltover—12 December, 26 CLE)
Tovan threw his armored shoulder against the clattering, creaking door, gritting his teeth and digging in his boots to hold it firm against the desiccated chem-wraiths that besieged the workshop. He whispered a fervent prayer, and the Demacian steel blade he held flashed with holy light.
He kept right on praying when the boarded-up window behind him burst. He would trust in his comrades. Even if one of them was a damned Noxian refugee.
Korva smashed her axe into the ghoul’s face with such force that it drove it back out the window, her axe still stuck deep in its skull. She jerked forward with her hands still wrapped around the haft, and freed her weapon with a furious shout and a jumping kick that struck the ghoul dead in the chest. She slammed the shutters back into place, and drove her axe haft through the loops to hold it.
She laughed, harshly. Tovan thought she sounded more than a little unhinged. She whirled her axe and flicked a line of sticky purple ichor against the wall. “Am I glad I didn’t leave you back in Noxus,” she proclaimed. Mercifully, she did not kiss the filthy blade.
Tovan lost track of his prayer. He was about to snap something at Korva when the door heaved and nearly knocked him down. He roared as he threw every bit of strength he had left into it.
The entire wall began to buckle.
Then it would come to this.
“Arm yourselves!” he shouted back at the civilians in the center of the room. “We must hol—”
FWOOOM!
The sound of flame. The brilliance of daylight, so bright that even through the narrow gaps in the boards it illuminated the entire workshop.
The pressure on the walls ceased. Tovan and Korva looked to one another, their grudging animosity completely vanished. In its place was mutual confusion.
Groans of the undead—cut abruptly short. The whip-snap of a blade slicing through the air. The heavy beating of great wings.
The sounds faded, and the light dimmed. Slowly, Tovan opened the door a crack. A ghoul’s arm fell through, limp. Limp—and detached from its torso. The shoulder-end was smoldering.
Outside, a heap of bodies. And a winged woman in shining golden plate armor, her back turned to him, flaming greatsword at her side.
Kayle looked back at him over her shoulder, through the slit of her helmet.
“Sir Tovan Spiritmight,” she said. They had never spoken in his life, but she had the look of someone who had just glanced up from a book containing his entire life’s history.
She looked past him, into the workshop, and then pointed her sword down the street toward the center of town. Snow hissed into vapor around her fiery blade.
“Take them to the camp. Be swift.”
Her wings fanned, and swept down. She vanished in a blur of white feathers and golden armor, soaring over the rooftop out of view.
Links
—CupcakeTrap
Caitlyn, you monster.
FACTIONS 
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